Enlightened Sentiments reassesses the enlightenment's liberal legacies by revisiting the wide-ranging development of eighteenth-century letters known as "sentimentalism." Nazar argues that the recent retrieval of sentimentalism as a predominantly affective culture of sensibility elides its critical motif of moral and aesthetic
judgment and underrates its contributions to the key Enlightenment norm of autonomy. Drawing upon novelists from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen, and theorists of judgment from David Hume to Hannah Arendt, the author contends that sentimental judgment complicates received understandings of liberal ethics as grounded in the opposition of reason and feeling, and autonomy and sociability and, as such, implies a powerful counter-challenge to postmodernist critiques of modernity as the harbinger principally of instrumentalist reason and disciplinary power.

Reassesses the Enlightenment's liberal legacies by revisiting the wide-ranging development of eighteenth-century letters known as "sentimentalism"

About the Author
Hina Nazar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Reviews
"Nazar must be commended for writing a lively and accessible introduction to eighteenth-century philosophy and sentimental literature, as well as a study that is refreshingly interested in the modern-day applications of its subject." -Eighteenth-Century Fiction "A major reference for the application of Arendtian thinking to modern British literary history." -- -David Thomas University of Notre Dame "This remarkable book enriches our knowledge of Enlightenment thought and its significance for understanding of a major strand of prose fiction written during the long eighteenth century." -- -Harry Shaw Cornell University



Book Information
ISBN 9780823240074
Author Hina Nazar
Format Hardback
Page Count 192
Imprint Fordham University Press
Publisher Fordham University Press